New York Times Magazine

By ROBERT SULLIVAN
Published: October 7, 2007

You could begin the story of Todd Haynes’s
Dylan movie at the very beginning, about seven
years ago, while Haynes was driving
cross-country in his beat-up old Honda. But
since Todd Haynes’s film about Dylan is as much
about Todd Haynes as it is about Dylan (or maybe
even more); and since Haynes is a filmmaker who,
in midcareer at age 46, is doing his best to
take the experimental into the multiplex; and,
further, since those who don’t like the film are
likely to consider it a kind of gorgeous
indulgence, a bizarre experiment, the temptation
is to skip the ordinary narrative introduction
and begin at the end, or very near the end, in
this case in the last few days of filming, on
the outskirts of Montreal, where, way in the
back of a dark and cavernous and disused
factory, there was a white glowing light, like
something in a dream. We begin then with an
image — an image that is all about, believe it
or not, the relationship between Haynes and his
film, between Dylan and Haynes, between the
artist and the subject he is trying to portray.

Todd Haynes’s Dylan project is a biopic
starring six people as Bob Dylan, or different
incarnations of Bob Dylan, including a
13-year-old African-American boy, Marcus Carl
Franklin, and an Australian woman, Cate
Blanchett. It’s a biopic with a title that takes
it name from one of the most obscure titles in
the Dylan canon, a song available only as a
bootleg, called “I’m Not There.” As I arrived at
the set outside Montreal and pulled into a
mud-swamped parking lot, disembarking and moving
toward the great white light, I passed through
the recreated past — namely the ’60s and ’70s.
There was a sign for Folk City, for instance,
and a fake cover for “Bringing It All Back
Home,” a mock-up with the actress Cate Blanchett
on it. There was a part of a bedroom from the
’70s and, on a nearby stand, a copy of “Les
Illuminations,” by Arthur Rimbaud, the artist
who seems to have inspired Dylan in his early
days nearly as much as he inspired Todd Haynes.
The book, the filmgoer will learn, shows up in a
scene involving the ’70s superstar Dylan, a kind
of jerk Dylan, played by Heath Ledger, who was
just leaving the old factory: it was like a
Grand Central Station of movie stars, as Ledger
was on his way back to the Montreal apartment
that he and the actress Michelle Williams had
been staying in together for the past few weeks.
Williams plays Coco Rivington, socialite, love
interest of Blanchett’s Dylan, who is known in
the film as Jude Quinn, the electric, rebellious
Dylan.

The bright light, it turned out, was the set — a
quasi-governmental interrogation scene that was,
like a lot of other things in the film, never
really explained — and Christian Bale was just
stepping off. Bale’s Dylan is a slow-speaking
folk-singer Dylan, the Dylan that seems to be
searching and pondering. “In the film I’m
playing a guy on a kind of fervent quest to find
the truth,” Bale told me. He is one of the many
people working on the film who has collaborated
with Haynes before — in Bale’s case, in “Velvet
Goldmine,” Haynes’s homage to glam rock. So he
was prepared, he said, for the audacity of the
script, for so many Dylans, so many different
kinds of films within one film. Whereas a lot of
people in Hollywood said, “Did you read that
script?” and scratched their heads, Bale was
ready. “I started reading the script, and I just
started to laugh,” Bale told me. He also likes
the way a Haynes set works, even on this, his
last day, where it all feels like the end of a
race. “With Todd’s films, it’s a homegrown
affair,” Bale says.

But back to the image of Todd Haynes, back to
the long day, a rainy day, in a cold dark
building, and into the bright blast of white
light, where Haynes stepped toward the final
Dylan to be filmed, the one dressed like Arthur
Rimbaud, the Dylan that Haynes named Arthur, a
teenage French symbolist poet, played by Ben
Whishaw.

Whishaw was wearing a frayed 19th-century vest,
coat and cravat. “white-wall interrogation of a
teenage poet,” the screenplay explains. “weaves
commentary and humor throughout the film.”
Bale’s scenes are shot in 16-millimeter black
and white, using old Kodak film stock, in a move
for authenticity — Haynes even wanted the film
in the film to look as if it were from the ’60s.
Time is confused, mixed; the chronology is meant
to be as it is in a Dylan song. This
interrogation of a teenage 19th-century poet is
supposed to be taking place around 1966.

Haynes looked intense. Off the set, he is loose,
laughing, gesticulating wildly or rolling a
cigarette. Here he was quiet and almost
preternaturally calm.

Haynes was standing in for the interrogator. He
stepped forward to fix the poet Dylan’s hair,
adjusted his cravat, then read lines that
Whishaw repeated. “A poem is like a naked
person,” Haynes said. “Some call me a poet. . .
. A song is something that walks by itself.”

Whishaw paused. “O.K., fidget a little,” Haynes
said. The director read on. “We just wish to
make inquiries,” he intoned. “Are you an illegal
alien?”

“No,” the poet replied.

“Are you an enemy combatant?”

“No.”

Let’s not bother with what it all means. No one
on set seemed to know for sure; they all pretty
much trust Haynes that it means something. Let’s
focus on the camera, which Ed Lachman, the
cinematographer, had lined up for a final shot
of the 19th-century Dylan, a mug-shot view of
the head, with the same shot of all the other
Dylans, a set of Dylan mug shots accumulated
over the month and a half of shooting. Together
these head shots will eventually become the
opening of the film: all the Dylans presented as
a team, a six-actor composite. Flashing on the
video monitor in Lachman’s wax-pencil-drawn
cross hairs were Cate Blanchett, Richard Gere,
Heath Ledger, Christian Bale and Marcus Carl
Franklin. Whishaw’s Dylan was aligned and then
filmed, after which the crew broke.

Then Haynes took Whishaw’s seat on the empty set
and, in the video monitor, happened to perfectly
align his head with those of all of his Dylans.
When I stepped from the wings to look through
the camera itself, I saw, in one semimystical,
semirevealing moment, the artist as one with the
artist he was trying to artificially reassemble.

Because Todd Haynes’s Dylan film isn’t about
Dylan. That’s what’s going to be so difficult
for people to understand. That’s what’s going to
make “I’m Not There” so trying for the really
diehard Dylanists. That’s what might upset the
non-Dylanists, who may find it hard to figure
out why he bothered to make it at all. And
that’s why it took Haynes so long to get it
made. Haynes was trying to make a Dylan film
that is, instead, what Dylan is all about, as he
sees it, which is changing, transforming,
killing off one Dylan and moving to the next,
shedding his artistic skin to stay alive. The
twist is that to not be about Dylan can also be
said to be true to the subject Dylan. “These
so-called connoisseurs of Bob Dylan music, I
don’t feel they know a thing or have any inkling
of who I am or what I’m about,” Dylan himself
told an interviewer in 2001. “It’s ludicrous,
humorous and sad that such people have spent so
much of their time thinking about who? Me? Get a
life please. . . . You’re wasting you own.” It
might sound like a parlor game, or like cheating
on Haynes’s part, but to make sense in a film
about Dylan would make no sense. “If I told you
what our music is really about, we’d probably
all get arrested,” Dylan once said.

“I don’t know that it does make sense,” Cate
Blanchett says of the film, “and I don’t know
whether Dylan’s music makes sense. It hits you
in kind of some other place. It might make sense
when you’re half-awake, half-asleep, in the
everyday lives in which we live. I don’t think
the film even strives to make sense, in a way.”

Richard Gere, who plays the Dylan of later
years, a Billy the Kid Dylan who ran away to
some other place, another time, tends to agree.
“It has an emotional truth to it, which is what
I think modern art is about,” he says. “It’s not
about the narrative. In other words, without
narrative, it’s kind of, well, cosmic.” (Note:
Gere, a Dylan fan, considers himself friendly
with Dylan. “It’s impossible to think of a world
without ‘Visions of Johanna,’ ” he told me,
kidding only a little.) “And that’s obviously
what Dylan’s work is about,” Gere went on to
say. “And I think kind of miraculously, Todd was
able to tap into that.”

Emotional truth is not something that you hear a
lot about in Hollywood story meetings. You hear
about arcs, you hear about beats and structure.
The standard biopic takes a musician and shows
his ups and downs, with the happy music in good
times, the sad music in bad; it locks him into
an identity. With his biopic, Haynes was looking
for another way, avoiding straight narrative and
leaning toward montage: six short
impressionistic pieces almost jury-rigged
together. At the most basic level, he has tried
to make a film with the power to carry you away,
the power of a song, and what he is asking of
the audience is to relinquish control, which is,
of course, a huge gamble. “You have to give up a
certain amount of control when you listen to
music,” Haynes told me. He wanted to get back to
what it meant when Dylan went electric, when he
ran away to Woodstock and recorded the oldest,
craziest American songs. “What would it be like
to be in that moment when it was new and
dangerous and different?” Haynes says. “You have
to do a kind of trick almost to get people back
to where Dylan did what he did or Mozart did
what he did.” Haynes didn’t want to make a movie
about anything. He wanted to make a movie that
is something.

And what he started with was that emotional
truth, in this case, just a feeling, a feeling
that he had in the car while escaping New York,
a feeling that was messing around with the
interior monologue of a New York filmmaker who
was leaving his small apartment in Williamsburg
for a new life. It was a feeling churned up by
song — a Dylan song, “She’s Your Lover Now.”
That’s what got him going on Dylan, which could
be tough to explain to studio executives.

Which, of course, is why “I’m Not There,” took
seven years to make. It isn’t easy telling the
money men that Marcus Carl Franklin, the
African-American 13-year-old, will play Woody,
Haynes’s version of the young Dylan, a kind of
teenage hobo as Woody Guthrie, while Christian
Bale will play Jack Rollins, Haynes’s folk
Dylan, the truth-singing protest singer, who
transforms into Pastor John, an evangelical
preacher. That Cate Blanchett, playing Jude
Quinn, will try to capture the 1966 suddenly
rock-star Dylan who was Judas to his folk-loving
fans. Haynes thought he had earned some artistic
capital with the Oscar nominations for his
previous film, “Far From Heaven,” but it took
his producers five years to raise nearly $20
million to make the film — not a huge budget,
certainly, but big for an independent film, and
big for an independent film that some will argue
is one man’s obsession, a Dylan-trivia-fueled
dream. Haynes is the first nondocumentary
filmmaker ever to have secured the rights to
Dylan’s life and music, what some people would
consider a filmmaker’s chance for big commercial
profit, but his script, rather than a
straightforward depiction of a man and his
guitar, was a combination of film styles and
cosmic nonsequiturs. While he was waiting for
cash to come through, actors came and went.
Locations were chosen and then abandoned. One
studio picked it up and then dropped it three
years later. Haynes didn’t finally find a
distributor until last December, six years in,
when the Weinstein Company bought it. Then
rumors swirled that he was on the verge of
losing that distributor when Harvey Weinstein
actually saw the first cut of the film this
spring. And really, who could blame the
skeptics? Even Haynes himself told me last
month, “This film really shouldn’t hold up.”

In 1987, when Haynes was 26, he began the first
film that the public really noticed, though he’d
been making films since grade school. It was a
film about Karen Carpenter called “Superstar,”
with Barbie and Ken dolls as Karen and Richard
Carpenter, the ’70s pop duo. A
pseudo-documentary made while Haynes was an
M.F.A. student at Bard College (he’d earned his
undergraduate degree at Brown, where he studied
art and semiotics), “Superstar” is intercut with
grainy video images of the Holocaust, the
Vietnam War, spankings. To represent Karen’s
anorexia, Haynes carved away the doll’s face as
the film unfolded. It’s an intellectual exercise
about roles and societal pressures, and its
reception was characteristic of all Haynes’s
films. Academics loved it. “It begins as brazen
mockery but as its understanding of the social
and cultural constructions of Karen’s illness
widens, it takes on a bitter poignancy,” James
Morrison wrote recently in the introduction to
“The Cinema of Todd Haynes: All That Heaven
Allows.” “Superstar” was also an underground
hit, shown in museums and clubs, until Haynes
received a cease-and-desist order from Richard
Carpenter, a legal move that helped make it what
Entertainment Weekly described as one of the Top
50 cult films of all time.

Around that time, Haynes was living in
Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and had been a founding
member of Gran Fury, the artists’ collective of
Act Up, the militant AIDS activist group. With
Christine Vachon, a Brown classmate, he ran
Apparatus Productions, an incubator of short
independent films that eventually produced
Haynes’s first feature film, “Poison.” “Poison”
established Haynes as a leader of what came to
be known as New Queer Cinema, a short-lived
movement that was as significant for the
gay-themed stories it told as for the way in
which it told them — from a gay point of view,
for example, or a feminist point of view.
“Poison,” an art film with three interwoven
stories (an AIDS-inspired horror film, a mock TV
documentary and a Jean Genet-esque story of a
homoerotic experience at a French prison), won
the grand jury prize at Sundance. More
infamously, because Haynes had received a
National Endowment for the Arts grant, it was
taken up by Congressional Republicans and
conservative commentators, who called it “filth”
and gay porn. It proved, among other things, to
be a big nail in the coffin of publicly financed
art films.

In Haynes’s third film, “Safe,” Julianne Moore
starred as a suburban woman with an
undiagnosable environmental illness. It’s partly
a horrifyingly intense study of suburbia (Wes
Craven called it the scariest film of 1995),
partly a metaphorical look at the AIDS epidemic.
Unlike the multi-narrative “Poison,” “Safe”
tells a straight-ahead story. But it’s suffused
with nods to the history of film — the opening,
for instance, is an allegorical nod to
Fassbinder’s “Chinese Roulette,” the German
filmmaker’s study of the bourgeoisie. At the
time, Haynes’s lover, Jim Lyons, was ill with
AIDS, and Haynes visited him in the hospital in
the mornings before working on the set. “I know
people who wanted to become filmmakers after
they saw ‘Safe,’ ” says Oren Moverman, the
screenwriter who helped write “I’m Not There.”
“I can give names.”

Then came “Velvet Goldmine,” another montage, a
love letter to glam rock (the film’s title is
taken from a David Bowie B-side) that Haynes
expected to be both his artistic masterpiece and
a commercial success — the melding of smart and
popular being Todd Haynes’s dream. But it turned
out to be neither. The first blow came when
David Bowie refused to grant any song rights.
Then Haynes faced nine months of script
rewrites. And finally, it received mixed reviews
— some thought it was maddening, others thought
it was brilliant, still others thought it was
both — and had a weak showing at the box office.
“I just kept thinking I should be having the
time of my life making this film, and I wasn’t,”
Haynes recalls.

“Velvet Goldmine” is also significant in that
Harvey Weinstein, then at Miramax, was a
producer on the film and distributed it. Haynes
says that Weinstein told him that the movie had
structural problems and was too long. He
appealed to Haynes to make changes, but Haynes
had already been cutting and making changes for
months and resisted. Haynes was also unhappy
about the distribution of the film; Weinstein
intended to market it as a Cannes winner, but
the film didn’t win any major prizes at the
festival. Haynes and his allies maintain that
Weinstein abandoned the film after that. Their
relationship strained further during the awards
process, when Weinstein upset Haynes by not
campaigning for the film’s costume designers in
the Oscar competition. “When ‘Velvet Goldmine’
came out, Miramax was behind it in only the most
perfunctory way,” Christine Vachon wrote in her
book, “A Killer Life,” named after her
production company, Killer Films. “In Harvey’s
mind there was a commercial movie in there, but
Todd refused to unearth it.”

After “Velvet Goldmine,” Haynes went into a deep
funk that lasted a long while. “ ‘Velvet
Goldmine’ almost killed him,” says his friend
Kelly Reichardt, who was a set dresser on
“Poison” and won the Los Angeles Film Critics
experimental-film award for “Old Joy,” for which
Haynes served as executive producer.

And this is where the Dylan story begins, when
Haynes is down. “I’ve heard this from other
people, that he crops up in life, in times of
crisis,” Haynes told me. By he, Haynes means
Dylan. Haynes had another movie in his head, and
he was about to go to Portland, Ore., where his
sister lived, to write “Far From Heaven,” which
would be his first box-office success. The film,
which was nominated for four Academy Awards, is
a tribute to Douglas Sirk’s melodramas, starring
Julianne Moore as a picture-perfect 1950s
housewife who discovers that her husband, played
by Dennis Quaid, is gay; she subsequently falls
in love with a black man, played by Dennis
Haysbert. Academics saw it as a play on
Fassbinder’s “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul,” a 1974
film that pointed to Sirk’s melodramas not as
mere entertainments for so-called housewives but
as a penetrating critique of the roles that
society forces us to play.

This idea of changing identity is also where
Haynes hooked into the idea of a Dylan film, one
that would not even feature the words Bob or
Dylan. It wasn’t just the music that got Haynes,
though he was loving it. “I just found this
refusal to be fixed as a single self in a single
voice as a key to his freedom,” Haynes told me.
“And he somehow escaped this process of being
frozen into one fixed person.”

The standard kind of biopic bored Haynes. “A
biopic is always weaving these overdetermined
moments with these moments we don’t know,”
Haynes says. “Ray Charles at the piano, Ray
Charles at home.” Early on, Haynes ran across
this line in the Anthony Scaduto biography of
Dylan: “He created a new identity every step of
the way in order to create identity.” It was the
eureka moment for “I’m Not There,” a way to
build a film with different perspectives, with
polyphonic voices. He called Christine Vachon at
Killer Films. He needed the rights this time,
having been badly burned on rights to music,
first with “Superstar” and then with “Velvet
Goldmine,” even when Harvey Weinstein appealed
to David Bowie for the rights to one song. “I
don’t want to go through that again,” Haynes
told Vachon. She suggested he wait to write. He
busied himself with preproduction for “Far From
Heaven.”

Creative Artists Agency suggested that Vachon
talk to Jesse Dylan, the film director and
eldest son of Bob Dylan and his first wife,
Sara. Vachon recalls: “What he did was say:
‘Look, this is the guy you have to talk to. He
is my father’s right hand.’ ” In a few minutes,
Jeff Rosen, Bob Dylan’s longtime representative,
was on speakerphone; in another multi-Dylan
biopic, Rosen might be the smart businessman
Dylan. Vachon remembers that Rosen was
immediately interested (both he and Dylan
declined to be interviewed for this article).
“He was like: ‘You know, that sounds really
cool. We’re always thinking about a way,
something that, you know, kind of collects the
music.’ ”

Haynes was instructed to send all his films to
Rosen. Dylan was about to begin a tour. Dylan,
he was told, loves watching movies on the bus.
Haynes was further instructed to type up his
idea. In telling him how to go about writing up
his idea, Haynes recalls, both Jesse Dylan and
Jeff Rosen mostly told him what not to do. “
‘Don’t use “genius,” ’ they said. ‘Don’t use
“voice of a generation,” ’ they said, and they
were sort of like, don’t use his name, and don’t
use music,” Haynes remembers. He was told not to
write more than one page.

Haynes felt certain that he had an idea of what
Dylan liked, as far as films went. “I had heard
enough,” Haynes said. “I knew he liked
Fassbinder.” (Martin Scorsese says that in the
’70s, Dylan first told him to check out the
Fassbinder film “Beware of a Holy Whore.”)

Haynes began his one page with a Rimbaud quote,
Rimbaud being a subject he figured he and Dylan
were both familiar with. It was a quote that if
he were pitching a film in Hollywood might have
killed the project: “I is another.” Then came
the Scaduto quote about Dylan creating new
identities. Then the pitch, two paragraphs: “If
a film were to exist in which the breadth and
flux of a creative life could be experienced, a
film that could open up as oppose to
consolidating what we think we already know
walking in, it could never be within the tidy
arc of a master narrative. The structure of such
a film would have to be a fractured one, with
numerous openings and a multitude of voices,
with its prime strategy being one of refraction,
not condensation. Imagine a film splintered
between seven separate faces — old men, young
men, women, children — each standing in for
spaces in a single life.” (A seventh Dylan,
Charlie, “the ‘little tramp’ of Greenwich
Village,” was eventually cut.)

“It sounds like a thesis statement,” Haynes says
now, though it also sounds exactly like Todd
Haynes. To hang out with Haynes is to hang out
with a guy who can drop words like “interiority”
and “recontextuality” and maybe even convince
someone that he’s missing out if he hasn’t read
Foucault, but who can also enthusiastically
recommend the latest hyper-cool band, especially
if it has just passed through Portland. “Last
night I saw the Blow at Holecene,” he said to me
once, “and, dude, I totally recommend you check
them out.”

Haynes sent the pitch off in the summer of 2000.
That fall, he heard that Dylan had said yes.

For Todd Haynes, Portland was a tonic. It’s a
lo-fi town, a do-it-yourselfer’s paradise, a
place where, in contrast to New York, your
career is not necessarily everything. “When I
moved to Portland, I was more social and
productive than I’d ever been in my entire
life,” Haynes says. “I remember being at an
opening, talking to Gus, and people were just
saying, ‘Hey Todd!’ ‘Hey Todd!’ I just felt
available, and I loved that feeling. In New
York, if someone came and knocked on your door
without telling you, you’d be like, ‘Get out.’ ”
Gus is Gus Van Sant, the director, who also
lives in Portland.

“I think he ran into a lot of people he really
liked,” Van Sant says. “They weren’t really
encumbered by all the ambition in New York and
L.A.” Haynes made friends with writers and
artists, people like Jon Raymond, an editor of
the magazine Plazm and a novelist whom he had
asked to assist him on the New York-area set of
“Far From Heaven.” (For one issue of Plazm,
Haynes posed in a Bigfoot suit, no one
apparently telling him how dangerous it is to
run around in the woods of the Pacific Northwest
in a Bigfoot suit with so many armed Bigfoot
hunters running around.) He went river-swimming.
He hung out at Berlin Inn, a brauhaus on the
east side. “He could have been on the chamber of
commerce,” Van Sant says.

Haynes bought an old Arts and Crafts bungalow.
He planted a garden, painted, got out his guitar
and played some Dylan songs. “Portland was this
green city, this place of resurgence and
rebirth,” his sister, Wendy, says. Portland was
also a cheap city, or cheaper than New York,
which is a big weapon in the arsenal Haynes uses
to make films. “He lives in a modest way and
that is ultimately very powerful, because he’s
kind of incorruptible,” says Randall Poster, the
music supervisor on “Velvet Goldmine” and on
“I’m Not There” and a classmate of Haynes’s from
Brown. “And he has people by his side who will
kill for him. These movies are very hard, and
it’s a long road, but it’s ultimately very
fulfilling.”

The nation went to war, and Haynes went to the
Oscars, and then all through the fall of 2003,
he read everything about Dylan he could find. He
read the biographies and the studies. He studied
the bootlegs. He read Greil Marcus’s story of
American culture, “The Old, Weird America,” a
book rooted in the music Dylan made in Woodstock
in 1967 with members of the Band and later
released as “The Basement Tapes.”

Haynes generally makes films one of two ways:
either with a story line or as a collage of
ideas; the latter he once compared to painting
while high. “I used to love getting stoned,
playing music, getting lost in that canvas and
not knowing what it was going to be,” he has
said. The Dylan movie, he determined, would be
that kind of film. He clipped photos, painted
paintings, made cards filled with quotes from
Dylan, from the Old Testament, the New
Testament. “I will open my mouth in parables,”
Haynes copied down from the Gospel of Matthew.
“I will utter what has been hidden since the
foundation of the world.” He copied down pages
and pages of quotes from social commentaries,
from folk songs, from Dylan songs. In one of his
notebooks, under the heading “governing
concepts/themes,” he wrote: “America obsessed
with authenticity/authenticity the perfect
costume/America the land of masks, costumes,
self-transformation, creativity is artificial,
America’s about false authenticity and
creativity.” For Robbie, Heath Ledger’s Dylan,
whose on-screen marriage (to Charlotte
Gainsbourg) fails, he wrote, “A relationship
doomed to a long stubborn protraction (not
unlike Vietnam, which it parallels).” The notes
themselves can seem like a great cache of
insider art, printed out with nice fonts, with
colors and graphics, reeking of time spent
cramming. “I feel like anytime I’ll work on a
film, it’s like a giant dissertation, a gigantic
undertaking, and this is probably the biggest
one,” Haynes told me. “Probably the Ph.D.”

In the fall of 2003, when the script was nearly
done, Haynes called in Oren Moverman, a
screenwriter whom he had consulted early on, to
help him finish. Haynes’s instructions were
Talmudic. “He kept saying, ‘We’re not writing a
screenplay; we’re interpreting,’ ” Moverman
recalls. At some point, Haynes wondered whether
he could pull it all off, such a wacky montage
of Dylans. He called Jeff Rosen, Dylan’s right
hand, who was watching the deal-making but
staying out of the scriptwriting. Rosen, he
said, told him not to worry, that it was just
his own crazy version of what Dylan is.

Finally, by the beginning of 2004, Haynes’s
script was ready, but Hollywood wasn’t. People
wanted to see it, because of Todd Haynes,
because of Dylan, but that still wasn’t enough.
Paramount picked up the film in 2002, before
Haynes had even written the script, because of
interest in Haynes from John Goldwyn, who was
then running the studio. At one point, it was
going to be shot in Romania, to save money.
Meanwhile, Haynes carried on with life in
Portland, flying the three hours to L.A. for
meetings, helping Kelly Reichardt with her film
“Old Joy,” which was based on a short story by
his friend Jon Raymond, which featured Tanya
Smith, Haynes’s assistant. “He gets involved in
all his friends’ work,” Reichardt says.

The Dylan script, meanwhile, was with Laura
Rosenthal, who had been his casting director
since she approached Haynes after seeing “Safe.”
“It’s an incredibly fulfilling relationship,”
she says. “He’s a control freak but a nice
control freak.” He called Rosenthal the day
after he sent it to her. “I said, ‘Give me a
second — I need more time,’ ” Rosenthal says.
She was skeptical. “I didn’t think it could ever
be realized,” she says. But she was up for it.
She sent it out to actors. “Because it was so
cool, the phone didn’t stop ringing,” she says.

Actors came and went in the years that passed;
Colin Farrell and Adrien Brody were on then off
because of commitments. Investors seemed to
smell niche audience. Goldwyn was replaced as
the head of Paramount, which subsequently let
the movie go. But by the spring of 2006, his
producers finally put together financing for the
film with foreign sales and a large stake by
Endgame Entertainment, a small but expanding
entertainment firm headed by a Dylan fan named
Jim Stern. “Because of my vast store of Dylan
knowledge, I was able to follow it,” Stern says.
The foreign sales came after Cate Blanchett met
with Haynes, on the morning of the Oscars in
2005, when she won the best supporting actress
for “The Aviator.”

“He was the reason I wanted to be involved in
the project,” Blanchett told me. “And it’s very
rare that you read a script that is as
impenetrable as this was, because it was
completely and utterly inside Todd’s brain. He’d
worked out every shot, every juxtaposition of
image. It was really like a operatic score,
there were so many instruments playing.” At
breakfast before the Oscars, he showed her
pictures. “I think he was really smart in
getting a woman to play Dylan,” she said. She
saw it as relieving pressure on the film. “I
think it’s the most externally iconic image of
Dylan — when he went electric and that tour —
and if a guy had been playing, you would have
been looking too closely for the Dylanisms,” she
told me. How did he finally win her over to the
role? “We talked about hair a lot,” she said.

Richard Gere signed on early, too. When Haynes
visited Gere’s place in March 2005, Gere had
just read about Dylan’s favorite version of
“Positively Fourth Street,” by Johnny Rivers,
and he put it on as Haynes came in, the two of
them lying on the floor listening to it. Gere
gave Haynes a book of pictures by Ralph Eugene
Meatyard, a photographer whose mask imagery
would make it into the Richard Gere sections.
Haynes sent CDs of Dylan songs to the cast
members. As James Joyce circulated annotations
of the inscrutable “Ulysses” (for his friends to
publish under their own names), so Haynes, on
the production team’s behalf, put together a key
to all the Dylans, to the films within the film.

If you were visiting the set of “I’m Not There”
and it had not yet hit you that each Dylan would
have his own film, filmed in a thematically
appropriate style, then it would probably have
become clear the day you saw Cate Blanchett
looking more like Dylan than Dylan himself,
standing alongside one of those swan-shaped
Italian modern chairs that graced the famous spa
set of Fellini’s “8 1/2.” If you wanted to feel
a little Felliniesque to boot, you could note
that Blanchett spent her breaks staring into a
book of Dylan interviews, the cover of which
looked just like her looking like him. “She’s
embodied this creature,” Haynes told me later.
“She blew everybody away.”

At some point, Haynes would sit you down and
show you that Blanchett’s Dylan was filmed in a
Fellini-style black and white (slow motion
sequences to be added later on); that Richard
Gere’s Billy the Kid Dylan would be shot like a
late-’60s, early-’70s Western (“Butch Cassidy
and the Sundance Kid” or “McCabe and Mrs.
Miller”); that Bale’s born-again Dylan would be
filmed in the bad-TV video that befits a
Sacramento, Calif., church basement; that
Ledger’s rock-star Dylan would feature the wide
shots and close ups of objects that characterize
Godard. As Dylan stole song and lyric styles —
from the Clancy Brothers, from Civil War poets —
so the film cops different Dylan-era directorial
styles.

“I said to Todd before we started filming,
‘What’s the “8 1/2” stuff?’ ” Blanchett told me.
“ ‘Is it part Dylan, part Mastroianni?’ And he
said, ‘No, no, it’s just a film that I thought
of for each section.’ I mean, he had a film for
each sort of leaping-off point. I mean, that’s
what I love, the structure of the film, it dips
out of the present and the past, of fantasy and
reality, but in that particular sequence, within
seconds, within one story.”

Like Blanchett, Lachman, the cinematographer
(who has worked with Robert Altman, Steven
Soderbergh and Wim Wenders, among others),
quizzed Haynes about his choice of film styles.
“He said that the obvious thing would have been
to use the style of D. A. Pennebaker’s ‘Don’t
Look Back,’ but if you listen to what Dylan was
saying at the time, it wasn’t about being in
rooms with bandmembers; he was being
Felliniesque with his prose,” Lachman says.
“It’s all this imagery. So what better filmmaker
than Fellini? What better film than ‘8 1/2,’
which is about a filmmaker being hounded?”

It’s probably not a bad analogy for how
Blanchett felt on the set. For one thing, she
was negotiating the fact that sometimes she was
speaking composed dialogue, other times reciting
actual interviews, especially a 1966 interview
Dylan did with Nat Hentoff in Playboy. “That’s
why it was so tricky to play that scene, because
it is from an interview,” Blanchett says. “But
Dylan’s obviously riffing, finding that stuff in
the moment. And it’s the difference between
doing that, and also knowing that this is a
reference to something that has already been
said. So it was very difficult to play because
you were constantly aware that you were in the
immediacy of the moment but yet referencing
primary, tertiary and secondary sources — the
whole Dewey system was crashing in on me.”

And then there were the constant logistical
strains. The cast and all its stars raced around
from place to place — 70 locations in Montreal
in 49 days, an insane schedule, money always a
looming question. “It was touch and go pretty
much the whole time we were filming,” Blanchett
says. “Films like this just don’t get made all
the time. That in itself is extraordinary. You
know, I’ve seen a couple of really amazing Thai
films shot in video that don’t really get a
release. But for a film to have Heath Ledger in
it and Christian Bale and Richard Gere and to be
verging on mainstream cinema — I mean, that’s
kind of a major achievement in and of itself.”

When filming was finally over, Haynes went to
Hawaii for 10 days, and then to his house in
Portland, to the TV room, just off the living
room, where he sat on the floor in front of a
flat-screen TV, which was also sitting on the
floor, with glasses, a box of tissues, tea and
lots of crystallized ginger, for the immune
system. He had the stacks of dailies beside him.
“I’m just trying to see what I have,” he told me
at the time. He made page after page of notes,
which were then carried by Tanya Smith, his
assistant, to the editor, Jay Rabinowitz, on the
other side of Portland. All previous films by
Haynes had been edited by his former boyfriend,
Jim Lyons, an AIDS activist and screenwriter who
was still in New York. Rabinowitz, who had met
Haynes through Oren Moverman, is the editor on
most of Jim Jarmusch’s films, including “Night
on Earth” and “Broken Flowers.” He is also a
Dylan fan. In the back of the ramshackle room
where he edited the film, Rabinowitz kept a
mini-Dylan shrine, part jest, part talisman. The
centerpiece was a painting by Haynes of Dylan.
Nearby, Rabinowitz kept track of the daily set
list when Dylan was on tour. “You know, I love
to edit with music anyway, and I have worked on
films with Neil Young, with Tom Waits, with Joe
Strummer,” Rabinowitz told me. “But to go to
work every day and to edit, which I love, and to
listen to Bob Dylan’s music — I mean, it’s the
best job I ever had in my life.”

One night in early December last year, Haynes
went out to dinner at Bluehour, a bright star in
the Portland food constellation. Killer Films
had sent out a reel to distributors, just a
sampling of scenes, a few days before. That
night, Harvey Weinstein bought it. Now, once the
rough cut was ready, it would go to Weinstein;
it was clear that Haynes was a little nervous
about it. They had argued over “Velvet
Goldmine,” and Haynes knew that Weinstein wanted
the film soon, to take it to Cannes in May. “I
will not be rushed at this point,” Haynes told
me that night.

Still, for the next three months, Haynes
hibernated with his film, Rabinowitz editing by
day, Haynes coming in at night. By Valentine’s
Day, they had a rough cut. Haynes knew the film
was long at nearly three hours, but he thought
he was close. He was thinking about the final
edits on “Velvet Goldmine.” “My only regret is
that I was too brutal about it,” he told me. “
‘Make it tighter. Make it flow,’ they were
saying. And I should have just let it go.”

He started to see parallels between his battle
and Dylan’s, the battle to be uncompromising in
your art yet still find commercial success, to
make the world bend to your vision. “He
maintained an incredible popularity, and he made
popular culture come to him,” Haynes told me.
“He did. He raised the bar, and I have tried to
do that.”

In the early spring, Harvey Weinstein would see
the cut for the first time, in New York. When it
was over, Weinstein had a lot of problems.
Basically, he didn’t seem to get the film.
According to Haynes, Weinstein did not think the
Billy the Kid Dylan, played by Richard Gere,
worked — in fact, most people told Haynes that —
and said that the movie was confusing in
general. Rumors circulated that Weinstein
planned to drop the movie altogether. “I think
that in this movie there are scenes and episodes
that are amongst the best filmmaking that has
taken place in American film — I mean you can go
that singular on it,” Weinstein told me
recently. “That’s how accomplished Todd is as a
director. I think there are sections of this
that flow easily. There are other sections that
are going to be a little bit bumpy.” But at that
moment, Haynes says, Weinstein wanted a lot of
those sections changed or, as in the case of the
Richard Gere parts, cut.

Their contract gave Haynes control over the
final cut, but over the next few weeks he made
small changes and cuts, bringing the film down
to two and a half hours. But the essence of the
film remained the same. To some extent, Haynes
knew what he was getting into with Weinstein,
and vice versa. “Harvey told me he didn’t want
it to get personal, which I respect,” Haynes
said.

A week later, Haynes had another screening in
Portland, inviting his friends. Jon Raymond, the
novelist, was there, loving it, while Raymond’s
father complained about how boring it was. It
was generally a positive response; Haynes was
hearing the things he’d hoped to hear. He
e-mailed me afterward: “Watched the cut Saturday
night with Jon Raymond and Tanya, while 7 other
friends and colleagues watched it in NY. & based
on their reactions and my own ability to sort of
see it through ‘fresh’ eyes, I think for the
first time in four years those looming clouds of
doubt and catastrophe have parted. . . . I
realized that I don’t have to ‘sell it’ anymore,
that ultimately the film is what it is — &
there’s no turning it into something else. And
what it is is like nothing else: both intimate
and panoramic, the story of a personality and a
nation (I think it’s a deeply patriotic movie).
It’s rich & literate but it’s very moving and
fun. Tanya and Jon and I talked about it for
several hours & later Jon wrote: ‘Tell them
(when they ask you what your movie is “about”)
that it’s no less than a history of American
conscience and American soul (at a moment when
both those things are in serious question). It’s
a movie about Bob Dylan as the president of
America.’ ”

Weinstein decided to do a test screening in New
York in May. On one side of the aisle sat Harvey
Weinstein. On the other side sat Todd Haynes.
Laura Rosenthal, the casting director; Oren
Moverman, the screenwriter; Jay Rabinowitz, the
editor; and Christine Vachon, the producer, sat
in the back, along with Jeff Rosen, Dylan’s
representative. The rest of the place was filled
with focus-group attendees. The film, a little
shorter, was shown but without effects or
credits. At the end, the industry people in the
back rows were joking about an Allen Ginsberg
scene in which he suggests that Dylan sold out
to God. Then came the questioning. It felt like
a psychic face-off: Weinstein hunched forward,
Haynes leaning back.

“O.K., how many people didn’t like the ending?”
the screening leader said. Answers ran along the
lines of “wasn’t very smooth,” “neutral,”
“unclear.” The psychic edge went to Weinstein’s
side of the aisle. Then a phrase caused whispers
and nods on the Haynes side: “One of the best
biopics ever.”

People filled out forms rating the film. “Far
From Heaven” had scored 18 out of 100 for good
reactions at its test screening, and now “I’m
Not There” came in at 45, the highest score
Haynes had ever received. Length, confusion and
Gere’s Billy the Kid Dylan were all “consensus
negatives,” to use the industry term. Haynes
says that Weinstein predicted dire consequences
for the film if changes weren’t made. (Weinstein
denies this.)

Haynes went back to Portland and cut some more,
eventually bringing the film down to two hours
and 15 minutes. Then he headed out to L.A. for
two weeks of sound mixing.

In Los Angeles one morning in June, Haynes,
Rabinowitz, Perri Pivovar, the assistant editor,
and Tanya Smith, Haynes’s assistant, were all
putting the final touches on the film — and
adding the dedication, to Jim Lyons, Haynes’s
former boyfriend and film editor, who had died
of from AIDS-related illnesses weeks earlier.
“We cut this,” Haynes said, as he watched a Cate
Blanchett scene of hallucinatory spectacle. “Jay
and I were ignoring notes about it for three
months. But we finally cut it when Cate said we
should. Not that I do everything cause Cate says
to.”

“You kind of do,” Smith said.

“No, I don’t,” Haynes said.

“You kind of do,” Rabinowitz said.

That afternoon, they were back in the sound
studio. There were details to discuss.

“They want it to say based on the life of Bob
Dylan,” Smith told Haynes.

“Tell them it’s inspired by,” Haynes said.

They’d been in Los Angeles for a week. Already
that day they fiddled with the basement gospel
band as Christian Bale sang “Pressing On,”
turned up a wind sound effect during a Richard
Gere scene and even adjusted the guitar of Dylan
himself, playing “Idiot Wind.” They had also
spent the better part of two hours trying to
match Dylan’s harmonica in a 1965 Manchester
Hall film to a bootleg.

Later in the afternoon, Haynes finally got his
hands on the master recording of “I’m Not
There.” Neil Young’s office had e-mailed it
over. (Dylan’s people had accidentally given it
to Young in 1968.)

“We’d been looking for it all this time, if you
can believe it,” Haynes said.

Haynes was loose, loopy even. At the end of the
day, the crew and even his folks came to
celebrate with cake. Haynes talked about how
tired he was. He looked dead. “I need to get a
life,” he said.

“It feels strange to be like this,” Haynes told
me on a summer afternoon in July in Portland. By
“this” he meant not working on “I’m Not There.”
“This” meant a late breakfast at Fuller’s, an
old Portland breakfast place, or vintage
shopping with Tanya Smith to get a suit for the
Venice film festival. It meant watching Lifetime
movies with his boyfriend, Bryan O’Keefe, who
had just returned from China, where he was
teaching English. Not making a film is not
something Haynes is very good at, of course, and
his friends realized that he has an idea for a
film brewing, that it has to do with politics
and the war. “If I’m lucky enough to get great
writers and great resources to show what really
happened in the march to war and with domestic
spying and torture, then I will,” he said. “And
if other people beat me to it, that’s O.K., but
I will take my time.”

Two weeks later, he’d broken down, at Smith’s
urging, and bought a new suit, which he wore to
the world premiere in Venice early last month.
On a party on a boat the night before the
premiere, Haynes was feeling queasy. Harvey
Weinstein was excited; he had already announced
that he would get Blanchett an Oscar nomination
or kill himself. And he had already come up with
a distribution plan that would start in small
art houses and expand slowly. He was hoping to
have Greil Marcus write liner notes to be
distributed at viewings. He was still sounding a
little nervous. “Whatever people are going to
say about this, they’re going to have say that
it’s daring,” Weinstein told me just before
Venice. “Nothing’s ever been attempted like this
before.”

As the credits rolled after the Venice premiere,
the audience gave the film a 10-minute standing
ovation. “That’s a long time,” Christine Vachon
said. “Clock it on your watch.”

Haynes was overwhelmed. “I was like, ‘Who are
they clapping for?’ ”

“I think people don’t realize how emotional he
is,” Julianne Moore, who plays the Joan Baez
figure in “I’m Not There,” had told me earlier.
“He’s really trying to work out what it means to
be a human being and what it means to live in
the world.”

That night, living in the world meant a dinner
party at the hotel that went late, and everyone,
for one brief moment, loved the film that they
used to think couldn’t be made, maybe every
confounding aspect.

The next day, Haynes went to the ocean and came
back with a scene description that was less like
an experimental film and more like one of those
Lifetime movies. “I just dove into the waves and
I came up in the sea and the sky was half-light
and half-cloudy and it was just amazing,”
he told me. He was elated. “I can take all the
I don’t really get its now,” he went on.
For a moment, anyway, it was a real Hollywood
ending.